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Trump election hinders U.S. authority in Middle East

Creates an opportunity for Prime Minister Trudeau to step in and assert moral authority

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau takes part in a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the APEC Summit in Lima, Peru, on Sunday. With Obama being replaced by Donald Trump, America's moral athority in the Middle East will start to erode, writes Stephen Starr, providing Trudeau an opportunity to increase Canadian influence. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Stephen Starr

Tues., Nov. 22, 2016

By electing Donald Trump America has lost its position as the world’s moral authority; but that’s a role Canada could, should it wish, now step in to play.

In the Middle East, the United States has for decades been regarded as the ultimate power, a feared and respected ally or foe. Dictators and democratic leaders alike on good terms with Washington could expect billions of dollars in aid, diplomatic backing or, in the case of Saudi Arabia’s ongoing war in Yemen, for it to simply look the other way.

For leaders in the region, a photo with a U.S. president represented the pinnacle of their life’s work. The embarrassing footage from last year’s G7 summit in Germany, when Iraq’s prime minister waits patiently to speak with Barack Obama before the latter stands up and walks away, speaks to the regard the post of U.S. president is held. Haider al-Abadi should have tapped Obama on the shoulder or called his name out loud, but he didn’t, and that illustrates the respect — even fear America commanded.

No major decision by leaders could be taken without, at a very minimum, considering how Washington might react. Those on bad terms — Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi or Benjamin Netanyahu during the Obama years — could expect at best, isolation, at worst zero protection from angry mobs bent on exacting deadly revenge.

For all the blame for causing the world’s ills that gets thrown the American government’s way, and much of it with absolute justification, for many in the Middle East, America the country is a place to aspire to. It is envied for its perceived freedoms, relative lack of corruption and its often idyllic and always exciting depiction by Hollywood. In the eyes of my Syrian friends, Germany, Sweden and Canada were excellent countries to study or work in, but America was viewed on reaching another level.

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Yet all that changes with the election of Donald Trump, for two reasons: Middle East strongmen feel America’s new president speaks their own aggressive, hardline language; secondly, and of no less import, is the fact people across the region know Trump is not respected, even in his own country.

Since July 15, the Turkish government has shuttered 170 media outlets and imprisoned more than 100 reporters and editors, effectively gutting the independent opposition. Trump, for his part, alienated and chastised, sometimes violently, the media regularly during his election campaign. He has also vowed to jail his chief political opponent.

In Egypt, hundreds of people have been forcibly detained, according to Amnesty International, while Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of that country’s 300,000-plus war dead, according to international agencies. Trump has spoken warmly of them both, and also how he plans to deport millions of illegal immigrants, a move seen to be controversial, even by Middle East dictatorship standards.

What does it matter that the U.S. government can no longer dictate terms to the authoritarians of the Middle East? Quite a lot. The Turkish and Syrian regimes and Israel had feared a Hillary Clinton win on Nov. 8 would undermine their respective domestic projects. That fear has now dissipated.

The election of Trump, does however, offer Canada an opportunity to act as a moral authority for a region largely bereft of hope. While it can’t compare in military might, Canada’s refugee policies and willingness to simply take care of its people now make it a symbol of optimism for progressive youth and desperate families in the Mideast.

Canada’s recent history demonstrates it is a country that rewards immigrants who are willing to integrate and work. The images of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeting Syrian refugees at Pearson airport in December 2015 were carried by outlets as diverse as Egyptian entertainment websites to Turkey’s leftist newspapers.

With the United Kingdom embroiled in a hard Brexit fallout and the European Union struggling to fend off a right-wing populism, Canada can show citizens of the Middle East that despite the unrest locally and in the US, there remains a space in the world for dignity and human rights.

If, or how, it chooses to carve out this new path is up to Ottawa.

Stephen Starr is a journalist and author who has lived in Syria and Turkey for nine years.

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